At Allentown Art Museum, You Can Read Between The Lines Of Work By Bruce Halpin An Emerging Artist

November 06, 1988|by GEOFF GEHMAN, The Morning Call

Call it the pinwheel effect. Eyes whirl after a few minutes with Bruce Halpin's oilstick-on-paper drawings at the Allentown Art Museum. Here, in the first show of the museum's "Emerging Artists" series, are nip-and-tuck duels between pattern, tone, space - within and between frames.

The 36-year-old Allentonian wastes hardly a stroke. He's pretty economical with meaning, too. Each work is abstract, predominantly white and black, unnamed. In conversation, Halpin generally avoids references, sources, resources. No mysticism or pretension intended, he assures; it's just that he doesn't like to describe his technique, mainly because a few steps are always missed on the evolutionary road. Besides, he feels his emotional state is not an issue. "The way you feel obviously affects some things," he notes. "Musicians will tell you all the time when they aren't doing so well in their personal life, they will play really well. But when things are going well in their personal life, they also play well . . ."

Judge the pieces inside their boundaries, suggests the guitarist. Halpin's tight control of form, color and format simplifies the task. Each surface is 22 by 30 inches; drawing is limited to a charcoal-lined box. Harmonies glue the most aggressive patterns: Witness the locked-in vertical zigzags; the oblong vortex/whirlpool sandwich; the black boxes floating in horizontally stroked white fields. Foreground and background deepen and flatten, ebb and flow.

Even borders compete for attention. Charcoal lines conflict with oilstick; umber edges into black areas. What looks like rigid geometry is fairly loose geometry. "It doesn't seem that important to me to make lines a certain way," notes Halpin, a graduate of Muhlenberg College and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. "I know how to make a straight line."

Analyze the works between the frames, he advises. Start with curator Sarah McNear's arrangement on the western wall of the Payne Hurd Gallery. Reading from left, a stack of eight solid bars fans into an eight-spoked terminal; flattens into a squat cross; bends into four broken concentric rings; regroups as two stacks of six bars, one hovering over the other. Rearrangement courtesy of the viewer's eye.

Shift left. A relatively calm intersection seems to pulse, as if the eye's traffic is forcing the loosely stacked L's to wave. The cross-section of the vortex/whirlpool becomes as dramatic as the complete McCoy next door. Scan the busier works and you may find yourself rejoining sets with subsets, children with parents.

Now circle the room. The medium-gray fabric on the gallery walls magnifies the interplay between pearly gray, milky and loamy tones (There's also something near the color of the exterior of a Napoleon). Blackness darkens, whiteness lightens.

Could this lineup be a sketch of the exploring artist? Perhaps not. Halpin says he rarely reworked ideas in succession, as the hanging implies. His first solo show doesn't have a true sample: According to him, organizers left out the more balanced, impersonal drawings to create a fluid narrative rather than a jumpy "encyclopedia."

"It's not just the notes," he points out, "it's the interval between the notes. To me, relationship matters more than specific objects."

Traceable objects and moods do guide his hand, he insists. These drawings, made from October 1986 through February 1987, were journalistic. That is, Halpin recorded day-to-day movements for public exhibition. A strict format, he thought, would attract gallery and museum programmers.

But diary entries they are not. Halpin says the series became a unified, continuous exercise, and "a way to mark and stop time" between larger, less controllable projects. He is no stranger to repeated stabs at narrow formats.

In the early 1980s, Muhlenberg and Lafayette colleges and the Ericson Gallery in Manhattan displayed his five- and six-sided works of oil paint on canvas/plywood and oilstick on paper. The twisted surfaces bore wombs of solidly colored, sometimes overlapping geometric forms. Both frames and contents appeared to spin, rotate, tumble. Then, as now, Halpin played figure off ground and vice versa. The difference is, thanks to brighter colors (yellows, reds, blues) and odder shapes, the dialogue is louder.